emigrating and the idea of “free love”
Some weeks ago, I met a Sicilian man who had been living in Ljubljana for seven years. He had moved for work and, like many migrants, found himself alone in a new country, surrounded by an unfamiliar language and a different cultural rhythm. In the middle of our conversation, he said something that stayed with me, fluttering like a butterfly inside my head.
Almost as a warning, he told me that the hardest part of being a migrant was loneliness. Not the paperwork, not the language, not even the cultural differences, but the quiet, persistent absence of effortless connection. Building relationships in a new culture, he explained, requires pushing much harder than one ever would back home.
Then he said the phrase I haven’t stopped thinking about since: “When you go back home, you get this type of free love.”
A love that is already there. A love that does not require effort, strategy, or perfect timing. The kind that exists in family bonds, childhood friendships or even, familiar neighbors. Relationships built so gradually and naturally that we rarely notice their weight until we no longer live alongside them.
This idea made me think a lot. It made me wonder how adult relationships, especially in our busy modern world, often depend on scheduling, convenience, and mutual willingness. Connection becomes lost in timings and tasks, rather than lived or experienced spontaneously.
I think about migrants who leave their countries without their families, and I think about this notion of free love. About the invisible safety net of relationships we often take for granted; the ones that, even across distance, continue to hold us.
Migration, for me, is not just a geographical shift. It is an emotional recalibration. Adapting does not only mean learning the phonetic difference between “Ž”, “Š” and “Č” or moving effortlessly through the local LPP transport system; it means learning how to build belonging from scratch. How to create warmth where there is none yet. How to patiently construct what we once enjoyed without effort.
After many days of thinking, I’ve come to find out that there’s a peculiar beauty in that process. In discovering that long-lasting connections can be created from scratch, not only remembered. That home is not a fixed geography, but something expandable. Something that can grow, reshape itself, and include new voices, new languages, new affections.
Perhaps “free love” is not something we lose when we move, but something we learn to recreate differently in another lattitudes. Not effortless, of course, but deliberate, resilient, and, in its own way, just as meaningful.
